A Time magazine guy once expressed surprise at receiving so few letters when he expected a flood of them–in reply to his articles read by millions. He didn’t worry that much. And I felt the same yesterday and earlier today. If people hated this TeleBlog‘s new look, at least they were politely silent. Otherwise why hadn’t anyone commented? As for those who loved the reborn blog, based closely on the green “Almost Spring” theme for WordPress, maybe they felt I was insufferable enough even without praise.
Well, it turns out that some helpful TeleBlog readers were indeed trying to reach me. My Nazi spam filter–“Nazi” as in the sense of Jerry Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi–kindly blacklisted none other than dr@teleread.com. Thus did WordPress‘s moderation requests fail to reach me until I looked at the discard list. Here’s the round-up:
–Two people, Michael Ward of Hidden Knowledge, and Roy Lewis, a retired automation expert expert wrote in to say they hated the new colors. A Mobileread contributor named Colin, however, said via email that liked the new layout. Robert Nagle, an early WordPress adopter, was pro-New Look. So here’s the deal with various people’s reactions considered. The layout will retain the same, but I’m thinking about darker greens and somewhat bigger type. The links may be white inside green, just as on the revised home page. Instead of matching up the home page with the blog as I’d planned, I may do the reverse in some ways and make the blog look more like the home page. Feedback?
—Branko Collin (another WordPress enthusiast) and someone named Erik were nice enough to pass on solutions to the RSS problem. In fact, Erik’s was the one I came up with on my own, from the WordPress support pages, after the normal fumbling around. Would that his comments had reached me earlier. Here’s the RSS 2.0 feed from WordPress, and here’s a podcast-optimized one from Feedburner. Remain issues are posting speed and some other matters involving the template–such as the messed-up borders of photos from past blog listings. I’d also like the pictures to show up more better aligned with the top lines of text (as seen with Foxfire). Plus, the archived posts have some words at the top running together.
–Editor John Robinson of the Greensboro News & Record told me I’d subtracted a few years from his real age of 52. I’m encouraged. Now he can more quickly be elderly enough to work as an ombudsman for the Washington Post. Then he can fool ’em with a pro-Net ‘tude that belies his age (usual reminder in this context: I’m an antique Baby Boomer myself, albeit in no danger of being a Luddite Post omudsman).
Colors slightly better, possibly. The Layout is good.
It’s just the choice of colors. Maybe you have your monitor set oddly? Take a look at boingboing, or even my magazine art site (magazineart.org) for some color sets that work well together and can be read easily by humans.
Mike
MIKE: Thanks for the further feedback. Interestingly, the colors came with a WordPress-related template known as “Almost Spring”–I didn’t dream them up. Just shows how aesthetics are such a subjective matter. But, yes, the colors of the TeleBlog will change in the next week or so. What’s more, I’m now thinking I might switch to Geneva type since a friend complains that the present font looks washed out.
ALL: I thought I could enable a feature to avoid the need for moderation–of commenters approved earlier. That might not be so. Still checking. I really appreciate the useful comments I’ve received; and if I can provided the trusted with immediate gratification, then so much the better.
Thanks,
David